Friday, January 30, 2009

A statement from the SWPThousands of workers at around 20 construction sites and refineries across Britain have walked out on unofficial strike. At the centre of the strikes is the claim that foreign workers are taking the jobs of British workers.Economic crisis is threatening the jobs and living standards of every worker.Just last week giant multinationals announced 76,000 job losses across the US, Britain and Europe. The world is in the deepest crisis since the 1930s with spreading mass unemployment, pay cuts and poverty.This government, which has so utterly failed working people, showers billions on the bankers to shore up the profit system. But workers are ordered to the dole queue. As a steel worker at Corus said last week, “If you’ve got a bowler hat you get billions, if you’re in a hard hat you get turned away.”We need a fightback, with strikes and protests, and the unions have been scandalously slow to offer any sort of resistance to the jobs massacre.But these strikes are based around the wrong slogans and target the wrong people.It’s right to fight for jobs and against wage-cutting. It’s right to take on the poisonous system of sub-contracting that is used to make workers compete against each other.It’s right to demand that everyone is paid the proper rate for the job and that there’s no undercutting of national agreements.And we need militant action, including unofficial action, to win these demands.But these strikes are not doing that – whatever some of those involved believe.

Resistance

The slogan accepted by many of the strikers is “British jobs for British workers”. That comes directly from Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour Party conference in 2007. And it has been encouraged by many in the higher levels of the Unite union. Derek Simpson and others at the top of Unite have done nothing to encourage resistance to job losses, or a fightback against repossessions or against the anti-union laws. Instead they go along with a campaign that can divide workers. But it lets the bosses off the hook and it threatens murderous division at a time when we need unity in action to fight back.It’s not Italians or Poles or Portuguese workers who are to blame for the attacks on British workers’ conditions.Construction workers have always been forced to move far from home for jobs, whether inside a country or between countries. How many British workers (or their fathers or brothers) have been forced to work abroad from Dubai to Dusseldorf?When workers are divided it’s the bosses who gain. Total Oil, who manage the Immingham refinery, make £5 billion every three months! Jacobs, the main contractor which has then sub-contracted to an Italian firm, made £250 million in 2007.These are the people workers should be hitting, not turning on one another.Those who urge on these strikes are playing with fire. Once the argument is raised it can open the door to racism against individuals. Already in some supermarket warehouses the racists are calling for action against workers from abroad.We all know what will happen if the idea spreads that it’s foreigners, or immigrants or black or Asian people who are to blame for the crisis. It will be a disaster for the whole working class, will encourage every racist and fascist and make it easier for the bosses to ram through pay and job cuts. Already the BNP are pumping out racist propaganda supporting the strikes.Everyone should ask themselves why Tory papers like the Express and the Sun and Mail – which hate union power and urge on privatisation - are sympathetic to the strikesRight wing ideas gain a hold among workers when they see their lives being torn apart and the unions offer no lead. No doubt some in Unite think it’s easier to get a fight around a slogan like “British jobs for British workers” which sets people apart than one that brings people together like “Workers should not pay for the bosses’ crisis”. That’s a doomed strategy.Instead of turning against workers from abroad, everyone should be organising in a united way to pressure the union leaders to fight. And if the union leaders won’t fight then workers will have to organise the resistance themselves.Let’s demand an end to the system where foreign workers are housed separately from the British workforce. Let’s bring workers from abroad into the unions and link arms against the bosses and their system.Workers across Europe are under attack. Out unions should learn from the general strikes in Greece and France that we need mass, militant action directed at the bosses and the government to win.• Fight all job cuts• No deals that cut wages or accept lay-offs• Smash privatisation and sub-contracting• Unity against the bosses, no to racism and the BNP.

The role of an online organ should not be limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies.

An online organ is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.

In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour. The scaffolding is not required at all for the dwelling; it is made of cheaper material, is put up only temporarily, and is scrapped for firewood as soon as the shell of the structure is completed.

With the aid of an online organ, and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.

The mere technical task of regularly supplying the online organ with material and of promoting regular distribution will necessitate a network of local agents of the united party, who will maintain constant contact with one another, know the general state of affairs, get accustomed to performing regularly their detailed functions in global work, and test their strength in the organisation of various revolutionary actions.

This network of agents will form the skeleton of precisely the kind of organisation we need – one that is sufficiently broad and many-sided to effect a strict and detailed division of labour; sufficiently well tempered to be able to conduct steadily its own work under any circumstances, at all “sudden turns,” and in face of all contingencies.

I like the word "agents", because it clearly and trenchantly indicates the common cause to which all the agents bend their thoughts and actions, and if I had to replace this word by another, the only word I might select would be the word “collaborator”, if it did not suggest a certain bookishness and vagueness. The thing we need is a militant organisation composed of a network of collaborating agents.

"It is important that workers should speak, not only about strikes in their place of work but about their children and their education, about everything that is relevant to their life. To a large extent the online organ must become a workers’ diary. Many workers find it difficult to write. When they speak quite often they are incomparably better than when they write because their concreteness, their colourfulness, their individuality comes through – and after all, for Marxism it is always central that the truth is always concrete. When workers write quite often they adapt their style to what they think the style should be and therefore it becomes dull and jargonised. Therefore the use of a video camera or mobile phone to record their words and then editing the story while keeping the flavour intact is very, very important and should be used."

Thursday, January 29, 2009

"As it is, the paper is divided among various writers, each of whom is very good, but collectively they do not permit workers to penetrate to the pages of the Appeal. Each of them speaks for the workers (and speaks very well) but nobody will hear the workers. In spite of its literary brilliance, to a certain degree the paper becomes a victim of journalistic routine. You do not hear at all how the workers live, fight, clash with the police or drink whiskey. It is very dangerous for the paper as a revolutionary instrument of the party.The task is not to make a paper through the joint forces of a skilled editorial board but to encourage the workers to speak for themselves. A radical and courageous change is necessary as a condition of success ...Trotsky, quoted in Tony Cliff - The use of Socialist Worker as an organiser (April 1974)

"The question of workers’ writing for the paper raises the question of the identification of workers with the paper. In bourgeois journalism the hierarchical concept in which a small bunch of the people from the centre supply the consumption needs of the millions is the prevailing one. For a workers’ paper the question of the involvement of the “consumer” is central. The abolition of the abyss between producer and consumer is central.

"It is important that workers should write, not only about strikes in their place of work but about their children and their education, about everything that is relevant to their life. To a large extent the paper must become a workers’ diary. Now of course workers find it difficult to write. When they speak quite often they are incomparably better than when they write because their concreteness, their colourfulness, their individuality comes through – and after all, for Marxism it is always central that the truth is always concrete. When workers write quite often they adapt their style to what they think the style should be and therefore it becomes dull and jargonised. Therefore the use of a tape recorder and then editing the story while keeping the flavour intact is very, very important and should be used."

"Therefore a story written by a worker that perhaps will interest directly only a few tens of workers directly next to him at his place of work is of fantastic importance. This is the way the paper becomes rooted deeper in the class. "

"it will not be beyond our reach if we aim to, say, have 50 items a week written by workers in the paper. For them we need not only perhaps more effort put in by the editorial board of the paper and the organisers, but above all a clear decision that items written by or told by workers have to find a place in the paper in one way or another. (Of course even to this we must have exceptions.)"

"Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all."

Monday, January 5, 2009

This video is one of the most successful I've ever produced - I've also discovered the value of YouTube's annotation facility, it allows me to use the video as a means of promoting protests and linking to latest videos. In this instance I linked to my video of street clashes on the 3 January protest, with an immediate increase in video views as a result.